Benoît Poelvoord

The missed rendezvous: such a potent storytelling device, such a tantalizing chance to imagine what might have been if only Character A had been on time or Character B had waited another five minutes. Romeo and Juliet has a whopper along these lines, and the device works even when not depicted—like between the action of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, for instance. One of my favorites is in Jules and Jim, in which a missed assignation is a brief plot beat, a mysterious “what-if” in the course of the great aching journey of François Truffaut’s classic. I wonder whether director (A Single Girl) might have been thinking of that moment in Jules and Jim with his latest film, 3 Hearts. Here a missed connection is central to the passionate tale we’re watching; its ripples keep expanding through the rest of the movie.